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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The thing is it’s not a “hey, need an abortion? just do this.” Look at what it’s saying: if you drink the bitter water and God judges you guilty, it will cause an abortion, and that’s how we’ll know whether you’re guilty or not.

    Religious POV: No human has any choice in the matter. Drink the water, God decides. Zero choice.

    Non-religious POV: I see a few possible explanations.

    One is the person administering the “bitter water” might actually have some concoction that worked, but if it did work, that would signal to the community that the would-be mother was guilty under their harsh law. Not good for her, not really a choice.

    Another possibility is that it’s a ritual designed to let people move past perceived adultery. Drinking the magic water shows your faith and innocence because you would have believed you were poisoning your baby if you knew you were guilty. In reality, maybe not, but that’s what the ritual presents on the surface. You drink the magic water, everyone feels better that God either didn’t judge you guilty or forgave you, everyone goes on with life. Everyone’s happy except if the mother was so desperate she would rather have been punished by the law than have that baby. Still no real choice.









  • One of the best feelings I ever felt was laying in bed the night after a car accident earlier in the day. It was enough of an accident that I was glad to reflect on it not being any worse, but it also wasn’t bad enough to injure anyone.

    When I climbed into bed that night, I was seriously doing that thing dogs do when you take them outside and they flop and wallow around on the grass with their feet flailing carelessly in the air. That bed felt so damn good that night, and I try often to remind myself that it’s the same comfy and safe bed now that it was that day.


  • This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.

    And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.

    *I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.




  • Gotta rtfa to get the full context.

    Even so, at least three county jails in Florida that sit within mandatory evacuation areas have decided that detainees will ride out the storm. These jails — Pinellas, Manatee, and St. Johns counties — have a combined incarcerated population of more than 4,000 people. Recent analysis from The Appeal found that more than 21,000 people are locked up at facilities in areas with evacuation orders ahead of Milton. An earlier investigation by The Intercept found that across Florida, 52 jails, prisons and detention centers face major to extreme flood risks over the next 30 years as such climate-driven storms intensify, the most among any state.

    Florida has among the largest populations of incarcerated people in the country, more than 84,000, according to federal data — exceeding the jailed populations of entire countries, such as France, Germany, Malaysia, or Venezuela.

    “With that number of inmates it’s not really possible, feasible to evacuate people out of there, and it’s unnecessary because we can go up,” said Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri on Wednesday during a press conference. He said the Pinellas County Jail, which has a population of about 3,100 people, is prepared to move people from the first floor cells to the second floor in the event of flooding.

    “We have plenty of staff there, everything’s safe, it’s under control and I’m not concerned about it,” he said, adding that around 800 deputies and jail staff would be on hand. The jail sits within an area deemed Zone A, the most severe tier among evacuation areas, and is located next to a waterway that spills into Tampa Bay.

    There are still systemic problems here, but it’s not like they just locked everyone on the ground floor and peaced-out, as the headline made me think.

    Edit: I just want to add that the rest of the article goes even deeper in, in my opinion, undoing my outrage induced from the headline. It talks about facilities being weather-ready and built on higher ground, it mentions procedures for ones that aren’t, it consults a former FEMA official…






  • And primaries are the “real” elections to get us there. General elections will continue to be major party A vs. major party B, with a “this is the most important election ever” backdrop, while primaries are where we have to try to get our important issues (like election reform) carried by generally electable candidates to get those issues injected into the parties.

    And the amount of money spent on primaries confirms how influential they are capable of being.